Lorde has taken part in an honest interview where she's confirmed her gender identity and her preferred pronouns.
With her fourth studio album, Virgin, set for release on June 27, the 28-year-old singer is using her music and her voice to explore the evolving contours of her gender identity.
In a new cover story for Rolling Stone, Lorde revealed that the album’s opening lyrics are a bold and personal declaration: “Some days I’m a woman/Some days I’m a man.” That single line has sparked widespread curiosity — and Lorde isn’t shying away from the conversation.
“[Chappell Roan] asked me this,” she told the magazine. “She was like, ‘So, are you nonbinary now?’ And I was like, ‘I’m a woman except for the days when I’m a man.’ I know that’s not a very satisfying answer, but there’s a part of me that is really resistant to boxing it up.”
Lorde still identifies as a cisgender woman and uses she/her pronouns, but said she feels “in the middle gender-wise.”
That fluidity has grown more defined as she’s worked on Virgin — a creative process she described as “the ooze,” a symbolic unshackling from convention.
“My gender got way more expansive when I gave my body more room,” she explained.
That journey began with what seemed like a small moment in 2023 — trying on a pair of men’s jeans.
She sent a photo of herself wearing them to her close collaborator, producer Jim-E Stack. He responded: “I want to see the you in this picture represented in the music.”
“This was before I had any sense of my gender broadening at all,” she said.
Lorde also linked her gender awakening to a major personal shift: going off birth control for the first time since age 15. The impact was immediate.
“It made her feel like she had ‘cut some sort of cord between myself and this regulated femininity,’” the article notes. “It sounds crazy, but I felt that all of a sudden, I was off the map of femininity. And I totally believed that that allowed things to open up.”
The theme carried into her music. While writing her track 'Man of the Year,' Lorde described trying to embody the version of herself she envisioned.
She recalled sitting on the floor in her living room, picturing herself “in men’s jeans, a gold chain, and duct tape on her chest.” She recreated that image physically — and the reflection stunned her.
“I didn’t understand it,” she said. “But I felt something bursting out of me. It was crazy. It was something jagged. There was this violence to it.”
She added that this look even influenced what she wore to the 2025 Met Gala, calling it an “Easter egg” for the new album.
Yet, for all the personal discovery embedded in her music and identity, Lorde emphasized that her experience shouldn’t be mistaken for activism or appropriation.
“I don’t think that [my identity] is radical, to be honest,” she said. “I see these incredibly brave young people, and it’s complicated. Making the expression privately is one thing, but I want to make very clear that I’m not trying to take any space from anyone who has more on the line than me. Because I’m, comparatively, in a very safe place as a wealthy, cis, white woman.”
Virgin marks Lorde’s first album since 2021’s Solar Power — and follows her four-year tradition between projects. Her debut Pure Heroine dropped in 2013, followed by Melodrama in 2017.